It’s Friday, and it’s time to be inspired. Well at least it’s time for me to be inspired. This morning while going over the curriculum for a day long seminar on video editing later this month a friend of mine sent me the link to the video below. Talk about editing. This video was shot and edited by Gioacchino Petronicce on his trusty Canon 5D Mk III. It is made up of 80 000 photos shot this last 3 years in various cities, Paris, Barcelona, Hossegor, Venice, Toulouse, Martinique, New York City, Montpellier. The film was edited using Lightroom, and Final Cut Pro with sound design being done with Pro Tools. The result is pretty inspiring. Talk about having a passion for photography, and a desire to create more than a single still image.
Final Cut
Boilerhum, A Year Through My Window.
If the Australian Tourism Board hasn’t already licensed the film below they should. This short 5 minute film compresses an entire year of travel around the entire coast of Australia into one short film, and it does it really well. The film maker uses plenty of time-lapse split screen, and tilt shift techniques in the film but he does it skillfully and it works.
I’ll be honest I am the kind of guy that really doesn’t like to see the latest flavor of the month effect being used, and right now time-lapse is as hot as stop motion was a year and a half ago. (That’s right I’m saying stop motion has jumped the shark so move on already) The thing is Boilerhum used the effects really well in this film and it works. Maybe it is the fact that it is combined with split screen footage that is offset or at a different crop ratio. Maybe it’s because the soundtrack chosen for the film completely matches the time-lapse pacing. Either way, what ever it is, it works and it feels fresh.
I guess now I have to start planning a trip to the land down under.
Final Cut X, A Much Needed Update.
Last night my friend Tim started sending me text messages from NAB as Apple showed off the new Final Cut X editing suite. All week long there has been speculation that it would be kind of like iMove on steroids, but from the things I am seeing on various websites this morning, I think that might be a bit of an understatement.
The whole application has been rebuilt from the ground up to take advantage of OSX 64bit architecture, which means bigger, faster and better.It also means that Final Cut can handle 4K footage on 8-core editing systems, thanks to Snow Leopard’s Grand Central Dispatch feature. The big things for me, that might make me start using Final Cut again are the new price point, and more importantly Final Cut will always be rendering instantly in the background which means instant preview and editing on the fly much like you do in the latest version of iMovie.
In addition to continuous background rendering, Final Cut added:
- magnetic timeline, people detection, instant color matching between media clips
- editing before media ingest, image stabilization during import (that is a huge plus)
- shot detection, the ability to detect medium shots, close-ups, long shots during import
- Audio clean-up, with options to eliminate hum or rumble during import
- Non-destructive color balance as media is being ingested
- Range-based keyword search
- Clip connections: (primary audio and video are locked synced together)
- Inline precision editor: (double-click on the seam between 2 clips and the timeline opens up to show what’s outside the handles)
- Smart collections
- Pitch-corrected audio skimming
- Auto-syncing audio waveforms
- Scalable rendering
- Resolution independent playback system, plus a ton of other tweaks as well.
Final Cut X will be available for download from the Mac App Store in June, for just $299.
Modular 4 